Celina is a young Mohawk girl who moves to her mother’s home reserve. She is teased by her classmates who tell her that she is not Mohawk and does not belong because she has blond hair and blue eyes. Celina starts to believe her classmates and decides not to dance at an upcoming Pow Wow. But her great-grandmother helps Celina understand that being Mohawk is not about how she looks but about what she feels in her heart. When the drumming starts at the Pow Wow, Celina decides to dance after all.
A beautifully illustrated story, I Like Who I am explores issues of bullying and belonging as Celina looks for acceptance in her new community.
This moving tale of self-discovery takes place during the Oka uprising in the summer of 1990. Adopted as an infant, Carrie has always felt somehow out of place. Recurring dreams haunt her, warning her that someone close to her is in danger.
When she discovers that her birth family is Mohawk living in Quebec, Carrie makes the long journey and finally achieves the sense of home and belonging that has always eluded her.
Joy’s fondest childhood memories are of sitting on her gramma’s lap learning to drum, to speak Mohawk, and to be a storyteller. When she lost her gramma and her connection to her Mohawks roots when she was eight, Joy used her stories to keep her gramma close to her heart. Years later, with a husband and triplets, Joy slowly gives up pieces of herself to take care of her family, including becoming her husband’s full-time caregiver as a mysterious illness overtakes his body. Shortly after his death, her daughters move away for school, and Joy finds herself with no one to take care of for the first time in almost two decades.
Lost and alone, Joy turns to television and social media to mask her pain. Following an intervention by her daughters, Joy slowly embarks on a journey of self-discovery to heal her heart and find her true self again.
One night, in her dreams, Stella is visited by her Nuu-chah-nulth great-grandmother, who teaches her a family song to call her guardian orca to her. Convinced he is real, they have a lot of adventures in her dreams. Then one day, when Stella and her parents are swept out to sea in a storm, Stella calls to her orca to rescue them and proves that he is not just her imaginary friend.